Memoir
Beyond Kin
Finding my way to the light
I’m an artist and a poet. My art and poetry explore my traumas and tragedies, hopes and dreams, and loves and joys. Creating these works is how I heal and grow from those traumas and celebrate my joys.
Sadly, I’ve been grappling with a feeling of distance, of ambivalence over Mother’s passing in 2018. As I navigate my journey of mourning her, I’ve revisited some of my previous writings. The goal is composing a poem, intended to honor her in some small way. I hope that by doing so, I may understand my long grieving over the mother from my childhood, and my ambivalence at her end.
What follows is one of those old posts and an older poem…
My relationship with my kin was… let us call it fraught. When I refer to “my kin,” I mean my immediate relations — my parents and my three siblings. But, things weren’t always bad as you can read in the stories found in the “About Me” reading list linked below.
“Fraught” as defined by the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary:
- Something filled with something unpleasant, a situation fraught with danger/difficulty/problems
- Causing or feeling worry and anxiety. I believe they loved me as much as they knew how to love. But…
